Hon. Andrew Scheer, MP
October 21, 2023
The Conservative Party is going to keep squeezing Bill C-11 for juice as long as it can. The latest is Andrew Scheer tabling in the Commons an MP’s request for information on the CRTC’s registry for the online undertakings (with annual revenues greater than $10 million) that the Commission is about to regulate.
You can see where this is going. Scheer wants to know how much the registry will cost. I can tell him right now: it won’t cost as much as the federal long-gun registry that Stephen Harper scrapped.
Scheer is not a fan of Bill C-11. He made that clear in this Facebook video posted in 2022. While it’s tempting to conclude it’s satire, it’s not.
Update: In response to Scheer’s question the CRTC said that it expected between 50 and 100 online undertakings would register and this would require no additional operational spending by the Commission.
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The 30-day period for public comment has closed on Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s draft regulation that brushes in some of the details of Bill C-18.
Google filed its response, rejecting the Minister’s document root and branch. Newsmedia Canada approved of one of the concessions made to Google (mischaracterized by Michael Geist as the publishers’ “surrender” on C-18). The Canadian Broadcasters Association asked for an amendment to the regulation to ensure that news websites belonging to radio companies don’t get left out in the cold as they were in Australia.
I will be posting the forthcoming MediaPolicy.ca review of Google’s response as soon as it’s published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
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Public trust in news reporting is always important and MediaPolicy.ca frequently relays survey results from the Oxford Reuters Digital News Report.
The Hamas terror attacks in southern Israel and the imminent counteroffensive into Gaza puts journalists in the unenviable position of reporting facts that the public may not want to hear, or want to hear them described in manner tailored to suit their own views.
MediaPolicy wrote about that here.
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